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NEW YORK — To Scrabble fanatics, big gifts sometimes come in small packages.

The word
te as a variant of
ti, the seventh tone on the musical scale, is a hardworking little gem among 5,000 words
added to
The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, out next Monday from Merriam-Webster.

The dictionary’s last freshening was a decade ago. Entries in the forthcoming book including
texter, vlog, bromance, hashtag, dubstep and
selfie were mere twinkles in the eyes of players.

But it’s the addition of
te and three other two-letter words —
da, gi and
po — that has Robin Pollock Daniel excited. Daniel, a clinical psychologist in Toronto, is
a champion of the North American Scrabble Players Association, which has a committee that helps
Merriam-Webster track down new, playable words of two to eight letters.

“Being able to hook an ‘e’ underneath ‘t’ means that I can play far more words,” explained
Daniel, who practices Scrabble two to four hours a day. “I call those the amino acids of Scrabble.
The more two-letter words we have, the more possibilities a word will fit.”

One woman’s
te is another man’s
qajaq, one of Peter Sokolowski’s favorites among the new words. He’s a lexicographer and
editor at large for the Springfield, Mass.-based Merriam-Webster.

Qajaq, he said in a recent interview with Daniel, reflects the Inuit roots of
kayak and would require a blank tile since Scrabble sets include just one Q. But it’s a
rare word starting with “q” that doesn’t require a “u.”

The new words add about 40 pages to the Scrabble-sanctioned dictionary, which already lists more
than 100,000 playable words.

To be included in the 36-year-old book — this is the fifth edition — a word must be found in a
standard dictionary, can’t require capitalization, can’t have hyphens or apostrophes and can’t be
an abbreviation, in addition to being two to eight letters, reflecting the seven tiles players draw
plus an eighth already on the board that they can attach a long word to for bonus points.

Among the highest potential scorers among the new additions is
quinzhee, a shelter made by hollowing out a pile of snow. Played on the board’s top row,
ending at the top right through an existing “u,” and a player can score 401 points, including the
50-point “bingo” bonus for using all seven tiles.

Merriam-Webster released a list of about 30 new words that also includes:

Beatbox, buzzkill, chillax, coqui, frenemy, funplex, jockdom, joypad, mixtape, mojito, ponzu,
qigong, schmutz, sudoku and
yuzu.
Geocache was also added, voted into the dictionary by the public during a Facebook contest
in May.